Federal and state courts require forensic examiners to offer opinions concerning the likelihood of restorability of defendants. There is limited empirical guidance for determining restorability of ...defendants, and legislators have little data to support their decision-making regarding statutory changes to limit the period of attempted restoration for defendants. This study examined whether commonly available demographic and clinical information predicts non-restorability in hospitalized felony criminal defendants who are refractory to early interventions at restoration. Archival data from a quality assurance State Hospital, database such as demographic and clinical variables for 271 cases were analyzed using a logistic regression analysis. Lower likelihood of restoration was significantly associated with the presence of a developmental disorder, traumatic brain injury/neurological disorder, cognitive disorder, older age, and length of restoration effort. Among defendants who can attain competency to stand trial, 96% do so by the 60th treatment month. Findings indicate that restoration efforts are largely unsuccessful afterward, which suggests that readily available clinical and demographic variables can be used to reasonably predict restoration. These findings add empirical support and guidance to determining non-restorability among defendants.
Pseudologia fantastica, a psychological phenomenon that has been described in the literature for at least a century, is an understudied and poorly understood entity. Sometimes referred to as ...pathological lying, pseudologia fantastica involves disproportionate fabrication that may be present for many years or a lifetime. In a forensic context, it can significantly complicate the evaluation of capacity to stand trial and, in certain jurisdictions, criminal responsibility. We review the current literature regarding pseudologia fantastica and present a case to highlight the clinical and forensic challenges it may create. We specifically discuss the complications that pseudologia fantastica may have on the assessment of a defendant's rational ability to consult with an attorney, a required element of capacity to stand trial. In addition, we discuss the implications of pseudologia fantastica in the evaluation of criminal responsibility.
We examined 2,260 forensic assessments in which the evaluator opined that the defendant was incompetent to stand trial. In approximately one half of these evaluations (52%), the evaluator concluded ...that the defendant was likely to be restored to competency in the foreseeable future. This opinion was reached more frequently with defendants who were female, under the age of 60, suffering from an affective or psychotic disorder with previous psychiatric hospitalizations, and who were noncompliant with psychiatric medication at the time of the offense. Similarly, defendants were viewed as more likely to be restored to competency if the evaluation had been requested by the defense, the defendant was seen as not impaired on the capacity to understand legal proceedings element of the Dusky v. United States standard, the evaluator had a terminal degree of EdD and the defendant's psychological, medical, and/or criminal records had not been obtained and considered as part of the forensic assessment. Using chi-square automated interaction detector analyses (CHAID; Kass, 1980), we found that psychiatric diagnosis was the most powerful variable in classifying opinions concerning the restorability of incompetent defendants. Defendants diagnosed with an affective or psychotic disorder were more likely to receive an opinion of likely/probable restoration than those defendants diagnosed with pervasive developmental, organic, substance-use, personality, or other disorders. These data suggest that the clinical condition of the defendant lies appropriately at the center of this process of predictive opinion formulation. The results also indicate that referral biases and/or crime-specific motivations for finding offenders restorable, often suggested as possible contaminants to this process, are not statistically significant in our large sample of forensic referrals.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ
The adjudicative competency literature has been growing consistently since the early 1960s; however, there has been great variability in the research methods employed by researchers and the way in ...which findings have been presented. We recently conducted a meta-analysis which included 68 studies published between 1967 and 2008 comparing competent and incompetent defendants on a number of demographic, psychiatric, and criminological variables. The findings from our meta-analysis are presented elsewhere (Pirelli, G., Gottdiener, W.H., & Zapf, P.A. (2011). A meta-analytic review of competency to stand trial research. Psychology, Public Policy and Law. Online First Publication, January 17, 2011. doi: 10.1037/a0021713; however, based on our findings, we developed 13 competency research guidelines intended toserve as a reference for those conducting research in the area. The guidelines represent an effort to effectuate consensus in terms of methods utilized and comparability in terms of results presented. We also set forth three areas deemed promising for future study. The guidelines and future directions presented in this manuscript are not intended to be exhaustive, but rather a much needed point of consensus among researchers leading to the commencement of a new line of competency research.
